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Lean Cuisine Culinary Collection

Glazed Chicken and Thai-Style Chicken

It seems that Lean Cuisine is really trying to improve their offerings.
They've introduced a new line they call their "Culinary Collection"
that is supposed to be inspired by a group of professional chefs
that Lean Cuisine calls their "Culinary Roundtable." These meals
can be recognized by the "Chef's Pick" label on the packaging.
Two of them seemed promising: a Glazed Chicken, which is described
as having "a savory lemon tarragon sauce," and a Thai-Style Chicken,
with "creamy rice with toasted coconut."

The first we tested has an unusually low amount of sodium for a Lean Cuisine
product, and that really makes me hopeful that Lean Cuisine is
working to improve the healthfulness of their products. The Glazed
Chicken is 240 calories and 2 grams of fiber, with only 450 milligrams
of sodium. That's pretty low for a frozen meal, but here's some
perspective: that's 1.8 milligrams of sodium per calorie in a
tiny little plate of food. Compare that to having a dinner meal
of my Spiced
Chicken with Honey Glaze over Jasmine
Rice with Green Beans
with Red Onion. That meal would be a total of 651 milligrams
of sodium and 433 calories - 1.5 milligrams of sodium per calorie.
(1.8 milligrams of sodium per calorie for my meal would require
just about 780 milligrams of sodium.)

Might seem to be pretty comparable, right? Until you try Lean Cuisine's
Glazed Chicken. After 5 minutes in the microwave, you end up
with several chunks of chicken tenderloins covered with a thick,
gooey sauce that has the sheen of cornstarch. It's a little sweet,
but there's no flavor of lemon or tarragon. The Frenched green beans
become dried out in the overcooked, mushy white rice, and the
cashews, which I would think had been added to provide texture
as well as flavor, become chewy. Even mixing the sauce into the
rice does nothing for the flavor of either. If I got this in
a restaurant I'd ask for my money back. To make matters worse,
out of curiosity I looked at the ingredients on the packaging
to discover that High Fructose Corn Syrup is the second ingredient
in the chicken tenderloins. Bad Lean Cuisine! No biscuit!

The Dr. Gourmet tasting panel was a little more optimistic about the Thai-Style
Chicken. As I've remarked before, spicier cuisines like Mexican
or Thai food seem to translate better to the frozen meal market.
This proved to be the case here, with a well-executed red curry
sauce redolent with ginger and creamy with coconut milk. The
rice is described as "creamy," and that it certainly is - extremely
so. There's bits of spinach and red bell pepper in the rice and
more strong coconut-cream flavor, but don't try spotting the
toasted coconut pictured on the package - it's not visible, but
you can taste it. This meal is also a little gooey, but the Thai
flavors make up for the overall texture. This has 300 calories
and 2 grams of fiber, but far more sodium at 600 milligrams (2
milligrams of sodium per calorie, for those counting). Of the
two meals we tested today, the Thai-Style Chicken definitely
came out ahead - but I'd still rather have the Spiced
Chicken with Honey Glaze.